Trust myself in the process. Through the process. Have faith in another person’s choices. Because if it weren’t possible; if people couldn’t change for the better (or potentially even the worse) all the psychiatrists on this wide universe would be out of business. Side of the road. Luggage in hand. And let me tell you, I’ve known and conversed with quite a many, and none of them have empty pockets.

Because it is maddening. Going against your best judgments to go beyond what you know you’ve been conditioned to be thus far. Because it has to fully unteach you what every other bad experience has taught you. It has to be the feeling with your heart that says ‘go slow’—but the feeling in your mind that says ‘you still have to go.’

Like this:

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know” —Hemingway

I’m better at surprises now. The dreams are enormous. We are lying on a paisley blanket beneath a sunburst sky. I have the hiccups. You have the why’s. Why is it you? You’ve interpolated my verbiage and now all I want to do is go house shopping. Stereotype meteorology by staring stars down. Ruminate in my ruffles. Sing in the shower “I’m a movement by myself, but I’m a force when we’re togetherrrrrrrrrr!” I want to know you better. Better, I want to know. Immobilized manic and idiosyncratic, I’ll curtsey for you. I’ll fiddle enchantless, err enchantress. Had a dream I was dreaming and you and I were staring into each others’ keyholes. Real slow. Not the sinkhole, but the peephole, I meant the eyelid, but really the heartbeat. Was I locked and will I open? Or was it moving slowly enough while I baked organic chicken and roasted vegetables? A blue supernova’d you on the line of barely. A tizzied skyride this is. See. Look at me, no hands? Or fear. And we both watch as the universe reverts, as joy rips holes into—not the line drawn but the line crossed. Not the line but the warning. Not the line but the stepping over, the kiss in which we’ve woven in me is you. Not you, but your butterskin-wandering, maybe you and an endless hot bath I wonder? I’m better at surprises now. The dreams are miniscule. We are sitting back to back on a plaid blanket in the middle of a somewhere beneath an utterly alone, no underneath a broken pie. I have incessant cough attacks. You have the why’s. Why is it I? Why is it why? I Can’t think of anything but how this lemonade is going to taste?

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He is sitting on the edge of my couch and I am watching the way he talks. Someone else is spraying Windex into my eyes, and ketchup globs around spinning in circles—splush all over the kitchen and I am screaming through my bones that I love, that I love. He is sitting on a comma, I am wishing for an exclamation. Someone else is having a tantrum because I stopped believing in Valentine’s day. He is showing off in front of his friends like he’s thirteen and four months. Someone else is not paying me no mind. He is surprising me. Someone else has let me sink, three days before zero hours, deadpan and a-lonely.He is talking to me—closing into my face, I am treating his words like rhyming sunshine. Someone else is soliciting muddy tears from each place I make up. He is causing an utterly obsessed set of recollections. Look what it has done. Someone else is afraid I’ve gone missing; an unattractive disinterest. He is keeping me up at odd hours of the night, I am eeking of him. Someone else is sleeping with other women, someone else is flyfailing, falling in lust with withdrawal. He has borderline “I’m not sure disorder,” takes unreliables-anonymous classes, and subscribes to ringing phone disease. Someone else is making me put my hand over the bible and promise I haven’t made tacos or had patron shots with strangers. In plain sight of anger. He is likely rotten, I ask please peacefully for the ache if in hindsight, if then it matters. Someone else is losing grips. He is understanding. I must like understanding. Someone else is quiet like a light switch—only I don’t know which.

And now I can’t tell the difference between any of this. So now he‘ll have to whisper loud enough to infiltrate my imagination.

He said “I want the opposite of everything with you because you only remember the bad”
I gave him a sad face and said if you keep saying things like that I’ll stay sad.

So these are your orchids. And then he asks me if I’ve ever seen orchids. Because these orchids, he said—eyebrows up—are talking orchids. Crawling up stucco—designer orchids on glowing wallsides, heaploads.

Let me tell you what they’re saying, he leans close. They admire the way you laugh, and the way you love your Dad. Acquired tastes. They love, your neuroses–spun together–next to the space heater.

Well this. I tell him. Is honeydew. It is sweet, unless spoiled. It doesn’t need water or sunlight, it needs to be savored. It has a window of time, and this honeydew. She has a line. Like the lining in your collar, or your lack of consideration.

And it can’t be suckled into the ouch patch, you know the part you can’t get back,

A line that,
Cross it if drawn
Balance if it waves
Careful in anomaly, (no
matter how little we have.)

He said, I haven’t promised you anything. Which is otherwise clandestine, which is microscopically kaleidoscopic, which is bullshit if I never heard it, otherwise known as art deco blue. I wanted Tinkerbell’s castle, I would’ve given up sadness for a clue where.

And I’d have grown him more than fruit and flowers. He as in you, you as in admirer.
But I guess I have to love you from afar. And I guess I have to love you where you’ve fallen,

which means move on.
Which is a line. A line once drawn—
if crossed is gone. Which is how I know it,
that does not offer you honeydew or glowing orchids anymore.
And so I leaned over to the flowers, and whispered to their spines:

“You have specifically been placed in a box marked ‘why for?’”

And the world, which is how I now know it, has aligned.

—Happy Valentine’s Day to all those I secretly admire, love Lalanii

“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”

Something funny as hell just happened right now. Like by the time I get done writing this only a few minutes will have passed since then. I have somewhere to be at 9 am.

First thing I do every morning when I wake up is reach over and check the time. On what, you ask? My cell phone. Despite the fact that the alarm clock is right next to me, the iPad has Night Stand which will indubiously wake me up at 7:15 to Beyoncé’s “Who Run The World?” despite the fact that my baby dog will begin her normal bark attack, no, I must check my phone. This morning, what does my phone say?

8:57

Shit!

I jump straight up, grab pants, shirt, start fiddling my tea cup. Searching for the number of my contacts to shamefully admit, I’ll be… late. If this post has misspellings, this must be why. Panic shoots through my arms, a cough session of nervous, a big seventh grade lump in my throat, like I’m going to cry. I hop around one-legged pants on/pants off knocking trinkets over. Stumping my toe. Silent slow motioned cursing. Grabbing only necessities. Feeling rushed but defeated. I open my laptop. As I am looking up the email and number what do I see, but 7:01 am in the right corner of my MacBook. My stupid droid phone needed to update itself. It’s just randomly two hours ahead? WTF.

Like this:

I’ve written poems for him. He’s innovative, incredibly creative, unique, marvelous to speak to and easy to learn from. A friend of mine asked me the other day “if I even knew what I’d look for in a man if I were looking?” I suppose he meant to inquire about what the most attractive attributes the man I’d love and marry and potentially cook butterbuns in the oven for would have. I realized I hadn’t put too much thought into “Superman,” and who can ever be exactly correct in saying, but after a bit of thought some of those qualities and traits might be:

Artistic

Intelligent

Honest

Funny

Eclectic

Ambitious/Driven/Goal Oriented

Empathetic

Observant

Level-headed

Reliable

Open Minded

Respectful

Faithful

Experienced

Expressive

As far as physical attributes he’d be handsome, a cul-de-sac type of smile that turns you around in a complete circle, pretty teeth, polished and well-put together look. He’d be well-dressed, confident, successful, and know how to take care of his family. What do you all look for in a significant lover?

I suppose the man I am in love with is also either the creator of these Lace Up Skate Boots (which I loOove more than any) or he is a fictional character that just doesn’t exist. I can’t tell which.

Every five minutes the thing nearest me changed into a mistake and disappeared. —Tao Lin

I’m in, if, of, and. I miss him like writing with my left hand. Tea cup got up and said “damn, that’s bad.” The what you’ve got til’ it’s gone. Watching me sleep. Zumba drop out. Clothes don’t fold themselves. Walls don’t happen to paint themselves fireplace red. Over my head. Send to journals. Write it. Revise it. Read it. Scratch it out. Insomniacs anonymous. He winked at me! And then I am there. I love it when a man winks. Then I have blacked. Then I am where? He said welcome to my world and held my hand while we were going under. I don’t swim like a fishie. How come they don’t tell you the things you want are gonna hurt this much? I’m poppin’ Motrins on a roller coaster.